Indepently devoted to the evolving Virtual Worlds of Open Sim, HyperGrid and similar technologies. Current opinions, making them easily understandable. By Avatar JayR Cela and guests.
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Tuesday, March 18, 2014

ComputerLife : Is Linux Truly Virus Free ? : Ditching WinXP

By Avatar JayR Cela

NO !!!

I know I do a lot of trying to convert folk's on over to the Linux platform, one of the reasons being that it's is less prone to Virus's, Key Loggers, Trojan's and such. There are another of other reasons as well. However let's concentrate on what most people commonly refer to as virus's. It's not all that difficult to write a virus geared towards any operating system, if you know what you are doing.

Number 1 thing to keep in mind, is the largest percentage of computing desktops in the world are MS Windows based, hence they make the largest target audience for some sort of unwanted payload sneaking in during a seeming harmless download procedure. Hence, the same reason Mac's are less likely prone to get attacked. It just make's common sense to go after the largest potential payload and return on investment of your time writing malicious code and how much profit it is going to result in.

The day's of script kiddies distributing malicious code just for bragging right's is long gone. It's big time crime now ! Identity Theft is Rampant, and the threat is growing exponentially every day.

I run Win7 and Linux in dual boot mode on numerous computers, and have for years. I can tell ya right now trying to maintain a Win_PC environment, and keeping it clean and free of malicious stuff has just gotten to the point I no longer see much sense in it.

So I'm back to my Windows XP Rantings, If you are still running Windows XP, and for what ever reason do not want to purchase a new Windows based computer. Then guess what ? Your on your own.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Because Linux is UNIX based and doesn't run in administrator / root supervisor by default doesn't mean it's not prey to viruses. But it is more secure at that level of access than Windows any day, especially XP.

By being an non-admin user in Gnome or KDE windows systems stops a lot of viruses getting in and installed due to lesser permissions that would infest windows XP easily, mainly because XP accounts by default are set at Administrator level during creation, that may be altered later but it's a big weakness for XP. Linux has some superiority there, and it's free <- the best part. Average users can still execute admin level tasks using the sudo command in a command line or entering the root password during installations / supervision in a GNOME / alternative windows environment so they still have maximum capability if they have that level of authority over a network / computer and it's very secure.

X, the graphical windows system GNOME and KDE rely on does run at root supervisor level, that is a weakness, dev's are currently looking at Wayland (http://wayland.freedesktop.org/) as an alternative windows system for GNOME. Other dev's are looking at how to tweak X so it's not running at root level. That is the current level of development at the moment.

Web-browsers like Chrome and Firefox should be updated in Linux often, as well as Flash player's and any JAVA installations to reduce the threat from scripting and cookie scammers / phishers.

Linux virus scanners like AVG Free, AVAST and ClamAV / KlamAV can also be installed onto a GNOME or KDE desktop and frequent full scan's are recommended. Linux is still a powerful and more secure alternative to Windows and I hope users of SL consider Linux as a serious option in the present and future.

I completely agree that XP should be ditched after April 8th and a Linux distribution considered as an alternative installation to Microsoft Windows. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint are good Linux choices I feel at this time, as well as the funky new SteamOS and there are many other Linux distro's just as good, of course. Free office application software & Video's can be watched in VLC, a free download and it can play MP3's too. :)

Plus, the 'closing the sale' part, Second Life client's are natively installable on Linux windows environment's such as GNOME.

This is a fantastically written comment, you are right all versions of Windows that I'm aware of have always granted admin privileges during the default installation procedure ( Shhheeeshh!! ) Easy enough to fix though, just by creating another user account for yourself with limited capabilities then only logging in to the ADMIN account during maintenance. The problem is not many average users are aware of this easy way of eliminating a lot of headaches :( "shrugs"

I have to agree with you on everything, for most folk's its just a matter of choosing the DeskTop UI that suits them best. Gnome / Unity / Mate / Cinnamon / KDE / Elementary / XFCE / FluxBox etc...

And I wish Flash would just go away somewhere and quietly R.I.P. Haaa-haaa-ha, Java I always installed the full current JDK and NetBeans set for auto updates and forget worrying about it.

I was also interested in the Wayland (http://wayland.freedesktop.org/) project, you had mentioned, Kool stuff / thanks

I enjoyed reading your post so much I'm planning on re-posting it in full tomorrow as the HeadLine, I hope you don't mind, I can always be reached at jayr.cela@gmail.com

If you ever get interested in sitting in occasionally as a guest writer for this blog, just let me know, I would be happy to discuss this with you.